Monday, July 26, 2010

Hooray!

Today is a great day, a day to be celebrated! Well, it was yesterday, but it did not become an essential part of my consciousness until today, therefore it did not exist until this day. Wikileaks, a fantastic website of amazingness, Released a bunch of afghan war documents that illustrate just how fucking terrible the afghan war is and has been. And instead of simply being ignored like most other anti-war efforts, it’s been picked up and aggressively attacked by the pentagon and the white house and conservatives in general. It’s on the news! All over the place! Damage control damage control! Spin that motherfucker until he doesn’t know up from Sunday! This is great. Wikileaks has been around for a while (a while) but this is the first time they’ve really gotten under the skin of any major organization that they’ve leaked documents from. So now people are blindsided by this website and the founder is suddenly super on the news everywhere and Richard cohen refers to the site as “dauntingly mysterious” and it’s a very big deal.

This is the kind of thing we should expect from the internet. This kind of renegade gonzo personal-private reporting with an agenda and a message. This sort of activism. Laws are forfeit in the territory of the web, rules are coded or nonexistent. It’s a place where pretty much every viewpoint has an equal chance of reaching an audience that exists as the whole of the people with access to the internet. This is fucking amazing. It’s great! Imagine trying to start a publicly accessible civil rights or pro-communist forum in the 1950s. It would have been shot to pieces, the organizers killed or interred, the dissension silenced. Here at last today on this day we see the dissension reigning supreme, using the tools of its oppressors, the media that so thoroughly detains diversity promoting ideas contrary and in every respect treasonous to the government in power. What a day.

The ultimate question, the ultimate test for this is whether it will change anything. If it changes, if the regime in power reacts accordingly, if the war in Afghanistan is ended for reason of stark criticism and intense mismanagement, then truly the rebels have won and there is hope for society forevermore. Though, I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t quite it. It’s not nearly big enough, not nearly shockingly outrageous enough. It’s a proof of concept, an applied attitude, but this is probably not the giant-killer. We’ve yet to reach the point where all lies are laid bare and all truth is set free.